by justin kane

Our Letters From Yesterday

Darren sits on his tattered high-back sofa as the war plays on the distorted television screen. Although appearing to watch as the bombs, bullets, and guts of a lost generation rip through his living room, our tired old boy gazes upon the endless seams of the table that cradles the screen. His hair: clean-cut, yet settled without care. His eyes: watered. Not from tears, but rather the swift irritation stemming from the dry fanned air in his locked down den. Darren stares as though he faces a million year ultimatum like the stalingrad from the old days of Butch Cassidy or Billy the Kid. To whom does he owe for such a swift immersion into a lackluster bliss? Averting from all things that matter for a so-called state of normality, more bombs and embedded distress cover the landscape of Darren’s eardrums as he remembers what silence used to feel like as a color in his head.

Once, not long ago, our boy was deeply in love with the strange days that tempt all the living creatures to reach out and be somebody. Whether large or small, simple or complex, mortal or divine; such feelings only remain out of contempt for those that seemed to have passed him by while he was suspended in a moral noose. Sharp cramps shoot up Darren’s arms as he briefly looks down to confirm that his fingers have been neglected and tightly clenched into his knees in the same way children animate make-believe spiders on their momentary lovers’ limbs.

The only thing Darren fears is that he will relapse into a mental state that has slowly consumed him for the last few lingering weeks of his life. Something that cannot be explained without discomfort: a state of sleep in the form of an internal combustion mixed with a second and unknown realm inside his waking life takes over in waves of purple rouge. What started as an unusual event every so often has now become a perfectly measured routine that is entirely involuntary. Call it a trance, or coma if you will. Whatever it may be, and wherever Darren goes while inside of himself, he hasn’t quite yet realized that this secondary world is not true to the reality that we all know so well.

Blood begins to trickle out of the edge of Darren’s right nostril and fills a line through the spaced pores of his lip, down to his chin. His eyes suddenly adjust and focus onto the television’s fanfare as if he had not even been aware of it at all. Darren is awake now. Darren will be dead soon. Whether he knows it or not, he will be dead and he will not be resistant to such a notion of the things to come. Even if it were staring him down like wolves, Darren will not run from his death. He is done running, for now until forever.